o 0 o R a p F I L é 5 HYMNS ON THE. HARNE.sS TRACK F RANK SAFFORD, a big, growling, impatient man of forty with a great red moon of a face that dwarfs his small, upturned nose, is one of the most successful of the country's trainers and drivers of harness horses. Since the opening, in 1940, of the Roose- velt Raceway, near Westbury, Long Island, he has been spending the greater part of the harness-racing season there and in three of the intervening years, he won more races than any other driver at the track. Last year, at Roosevelt t and elsewhere, he won seventy-six races and purses amounting to $145,811 for the owners whose horses he was handling, and, while he was at it, set a world's record with the pacer Knight Dream. (He also drove the mile in one minute and fifty-nine seconds on a mile track, something comparatively few oth- er harness horsemen have ever done.) In 1947, he set three other world's records with Knight Dream, and still another with the trotter Sidney Han- over, and won $114,064. As of last week, Safford had set no world's rec- ords this year, but the ten owners of the nineteen horses he has been driving were unconcerned, for his winnings had already amounted tó $125,000, indi- cating that by the time the six-month Roosevelt season ends, a fortnight hence, the total of the purses he has picked up since last May will equal, if not surpass, his 1 948 figure. Among Safford's associates it is believed that, what with his various sources of in- come-his training and driving fees, his betting, his profits from breeding and training horses of his own and from '-' occasionally racing one of them, and his substantial share of the purses he wins for his clients-he manages to clear in the vicinity of a hundred thousand dollars a year. Almost any morning during the local season, Safford can be seen and heard out on the track at Roosevelt Raceway, his six-foot, two-h undred-and-forty- pound body hunched fq,rward in a jog cart-the same thing as a sulky , really, only heavier-as he works out a pacer or a trotter while dolefully howling hymns in an off-key voice. He has asthma as well as a pair of powerful lungs, making his tones at once loud and indistinct. He will stand for no nonsense from either a horse or its owner. If a horse with a bad tooth shows an unwillingness to submit to dentistry, Safford, who, , """'-... , though not a licensed veterinarian, is thoroughly competent to doctor his ani- mals in an emergency, may grab it by the neck and a. foreleg and wrestle it to the ground, then lie athwart its neck while he performs the necessary opera- tion. He has yet to wrestle an owner to the ground, but not long ago he did almost forcibly eject one from his stables. Despite repeated rebukes, the owner of a mare Safford was han- dling had persisted in feeding the animal candy. Finally, Safford lost patience and turned on the owner with an angry, whispery roar. "Get that mare out of here!" he said. "And you get out of here, too!" Safford walks with an engagingly rustic swagger. His green-brown eyes glint shrewdly in his ruddy, usually un- shaven expanse of face. Sometimes he is moderately jovial, but he never entirely loses the wary air of a man who knows that what he doesn't say can't be held against him. "He has such a sweet smile for such a suspicious fellow," a horsy lady at the Raceway remarked the other evening. When Safford is not clad in "'- the green-and-white racing silks of his stable, he ordinarily wears a gray fedora, now nine years old, with its brim turned up in front, giving him a wind-swept, go-to-hell, buccaneerish look, and a red woollen shirt, one tail of which some- times dangles outside his khaki trousers. It is against his principles to talk about a horse with its owner. He has learned that if he says a horse is fast, its owner will be put out if it doesn't win, and that if he says it's slow, its owner will complain that Safford should have trained it better. This aversion to discussing his charges at times confines his vocal ex- '-' pression to what one of his clients has described as "a vocabulary of three words-two grunts and 'goodbye.'" Furthermore, Safford considers it bad luck to allow a horse he is training to be photographed. In 1 947, at Roosevelt Raceway, just before the start of the forty-thousand-dollar Roosevelt Two- Mile Trot, a photographer, over Saf- ford's objections, took a picture of him and his horse. In the course of the race, a horse named Kaola fell, and most of the horses behind, and their drivers and sulkies, piled up in a frightful tangle. The casualties included Safford, whose head was wedged under the inside rail. The blow knocked him unconscious, and he could not be extricated until the 37 I '" ....'.... "- -" Ã . a //; . } \ \ #f t:;:d 6ßT Frank /:;afford rail had been sawed away. \\Then he re- gained his senses, he staggered around the grounds until he found the offendIng photographer. "Don't you know better than that?" he said. "Why, you damn near killed me!" In similar accidents, not all of them caused by photographers, Safford suf- fered three fractured ribs in 1940, a broken left hand in 1 942, a dislocated right shoulder in 1943, and last year internal injuries that necessitated an op- eration. Except for the time he had the operation, he has never been in a hospital for more than six hours and has always been back in his sulky the next day. Sometimes, after a spill that would have incapacitated a man less du- rable and less stubborn, he has driven in a later race on the same program. He is a practical man, who frankly says he races for money rather than glory and is en- tirely aware that any race may end in a costly accident. A few seasons ago, a friend urged him to enter a race that had little money in it, pointing out that if he came in first, he would be the win- ner of more races than anyone else that year. "Can't eat titles when snow's on the ground," Safford growled, and stayed out of the race. T HE season at Roosevelt Raceway is a long and wearing one. Every weekday night, from early May to late October, eight races, most of them with eight entries each, are run off. Saf- ford almost always drives in at least one race a session and sometimes in as many as seven. His working day starts shortly before six in the morning, when he arrives at the stable that is provided